The purpose of this book is to make the reader famliar with software engineering for distributed systems. Software engineering is a valuable discipline in the develop ment of software. The reader has surely heard of software systems completed months or years later than scheduled with huge cost overruns, systems which on completion did not provide the performance promised, and systems so catastrophic that they had to be abandoned without ever doing any useful work. Software engi neering is the discipline of creating and maintaining software; when used in con junction with more general methods...